Overview

Psychology is a huge subject that extends in its coverage from neurobiology through to complex social interactions. The course will give students the opportunity to explore different aspects of the discipline as it is applied to medicine, and to emphasize those aspects they find of most interest.

Students will be presented with a range of explanatory frameworks for understanding phenomena such as consciousness, attention, memory and language. They will have an opportunity to evaluate the strength and weaknesses of different interpretations in the light of empirical data.

The course will give students the opportunity to place ‘core’ knowledge from the Neurobiology & Human Behaviour (NHB) course in a wider scientific context. It will illustrate how the scientific investigation of psychology relates to broader social and medical issues.

This course emphasises human psychology and builds on material covered by the medics’ core course in Neurobiology & Human Behaviour.

This is considered to be the most severe of the childhood psychiatric conditions. Cognitive theories such as the mind-blindness, central coherence, and executive accounts are introduced, the diagnosis is summarized, and its infancy onset is explored. In this lecture (as with the other clinical lectures), videos will be shown which illustrate patients with the condition, to bring the topic alive.

This is one of the most challenging of the adult neuroses. The lecture explores the difference between the identification of the obsessions as distinct from the compulsive aspects. Both cognitive and neurobiological factors are considered as causes, and behavioural treatments are described.

Expectations influence our sensory perception of the world, as well as of ourselves. This lecture will introduce the intriguing phenomena of the placebo and nocebo effects, their common manifestations in clinical settings, and some of the experimental approaches for studying these.

Infants' knowledge of the physical and social world, from birth to the second year of life. This will include early vision, cross-modal abilities, early memory, number abilities, object individuation by kind, object permanence (by search and dishabituation), face perception, social referencing, agency concepts.

Two major processes in mental development: (a) acquiring language, (b) acquiring a 'theory of mind'. Under language development we will look at cognitive prerequisites, lexical development, and syntax. In the latter case, Chomsky's linguistic theory will be briefly sketched and an experiment described relevant to one of his claims. The standard account of theory-of-mind development will be described as well as simulation theory, meta-representational theory, and the executive theory.

Many cognitive abilities including everyday language skills are affected by normal ageing. This lectures examines what abilities are impaired in old age and which are spared, addressing the questions of whether impairments in language may be caused by other cognitive factors, and whether some apparent impairments actually reflect age-related expertise.

This lecture will consider some higher-level cognitive processes involved in thinking and reasoning. As we will see, humans display some common flaws in judging probabilities and making decisions: rather than analysing a problem or decision in depth (using a normative model, such as logic or probability theory), humans often use quick and simple heuristics. Medical doctors are certainly susceptible to these tendencies, which pose some important considerations when communicating health and illness information to patients.

Practicals

Many different forms of psychopathology are characterised by biased processing of disorder-relevant information. In this practical, we will study a number of experimental paradigms used to look at 'attentional bias', and examine these biases in relation to common forms of healthy anxiety.

2 (Dr K. Plaisted-Grant). IQ [3-5pm, Wed 23 April]

We will study a selection of IQ tests, in particular parts of the WAIS and Raven's Advanced Progressive Matrices.

Assessment (examinations)

Students are examined in the Experimental Psychology option within the MVST Special Options paper. The examination will consist of two essay questions from a choice of five.

Note that prior to 2004–5, a different format was used; take this into account when visiting the Faculty of Biology's past paper collection. Note also that lecture content can vary from year to year; students will only be examined on material taught this year.

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